This section describes approaches that could be employed, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or employed. Hence, unless explicitly specified otherwise, any approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application, and any approaches described in this section are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Cloud computing enables network access to a shared pool of configurable resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimum management effort. Cloud computing can be implemented based on one or more data centers implementing one or more physical computing machines known as “servers”: the physical servers allocate compute and memory resources, under the control of a management agent, to form “virtual machines”. The virtual machines can provide computing services under the control of the management agent. Virtualization technologies enable a virtual machine to be moved dynamically from one physical server to a destination physical server, where the destination physical server can be in the same data center or a different data center. The ability to move a virtual machine dynamically, however, introduces a number of challenges that necessitates the need for improved firewall protection for the movable virtual machine.